Been a while...

Haven't been here for a long while.
Then again, Oracle is on the way out from our site so I'm not at all surprised!
I'll bet all those who spent so much of their time trying to get me ejected from my position and replaced by outsourcing must be really happy they created for themselves a long future here!   😄

12.2 upgrades done in almost all left-over dbs now.  After nearly 2 years of patch/patch the patch/and patch again!
Just to give you an idea of how bad this was, the patches so far:
25415713, 28163133 (July 2018 release update, heaps of patches here), 28390273, applied in left to right order.
And a few more needed but so far I've been able to work around those issues without any further patching.  But to get here it took 2 years!
The number of "release updates" I had to go through until I found one with a working dbua was absolutely mind-blowing! 

First it was RMAN not working properly at all.  Then it was logs being produced in enormous quantities into $ORACLE_BASE.   Then it was RMAN making huge logs again.
And don't get me started on how many times the dbua upgrade tool failed!...  😡


And huge issues with getting the lot to become stable enough to run anything on it!

Quite frankly, I'm not surprised Oracle is almost on the way out of most sites here in NSW and the few remaining ones are not planning to do anything else after 12.2...

Ah well, I'm sure it's because of all those "bad dba 1.0"s who are condemned to work with unstable and buggy software! And of course, my name is Father Xmas.

Speaking of which, happy 2020 to anyone who still occasionally might come here.

On the photo front not much happening.
The one below was from my daughter's marriage.
The ring-bearer was our valiant Hutch, who is now known as

"Dog-of-The-Rings"

(with profuse apologies to Sir Peter Jackson!  😂)